Background

Driven by input from the scientific community, the Cancer Imaging Program (CIP) stands at the crossroad of two powerful scientific requisites: the need for cross-disciplinary research and the increase of inter-institutional data sharing. The Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA) is building a research community focused on connecting cancer phenotypes to genotypes by providing clinical images matched to subjects from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA).TCGA began in 2006 as a three-year pilot jointly sponsored by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI). The TCGA pilot project (focused initially on glioblastoma, ovary, and lung cancers) confirmed that an atlas of genomic changes could be constructed for specific cancer types. It also showed that national networks of research and technology teams working on related projects could pool their efforts, create an economy of scale, and develop an infrastructure for making the data publicly accessible. Freely available data enables researchers across the world to make and validate important discoveries. The success of that pilot encouraged the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to invest in TCGA’s efforts to collect and characterize more than 20 additional tumor types and make findings freely accessible for researchers to download via TCGA Data Portal.

As an opportunity to leverage this wealth of new biomedical knowledge, CIP used its agreements with TCGA Tissue Site Source institutions to collect clinical diagnostic images for TCIA that match genomically analyzed tissue cases in the 20-plus cancer types that TCGA has characterized.

Imaging Source Site (ISS) groups are created and governed by participants from institutions providing imaging data for a given cancer type. Modeled after TCGA’s analysis groups, these ISS groups have the opportunity to publish a marker paper for a given cancer type, as outlined in the publication policies below, to increase participation in building multi-institutional data sets into an open community resource.

Ongoing Research Efforts

CIP continues to encourage ad hoc multi-institutional research teams to analyze these data sets as they are collected. Efforts have begun or are being initiated for the following TCGA tissue types. Points of contact for collaborating with the existing research groups can be found on their respective pages.

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